Harris’s VP Choice is Just the Beginning

America’s political ruling class is beginning to understand antisemitism as a useful tool for winning elections.

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Last week, Vice President Harris looked at the strategically smartest choice for her running mate and picked the guy standing next to him.

The smart choice — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — would have, if tapped by Harris, almost certainly won the Dems his tricky swing state; appealed to moderate voters; and signaled the Democratic Party’s acceptance of Jews during a time of extreme antisemitism.

Her actual choice — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — will not win her a swing state (M.N. is reliably Democratic); openly appeals to the Strasserist wing of the party (because they very vocally supported him over and above Shapiro); and… is not Jewish.

Harris’s campaign team understands something which the rest of America’s political ruling is learning at an alarming pace: antisemitism has an unmatched electoral record. It allows entire nations of people to place all of their social ills, economic misfortunes, and cultural anxieties onto the world’s #1 scapegoats.

Rep. Cori Bush’s satisfying defeat seemed to dampen the blow of the bad news. Yet commentators may be overstating the role antisemitism played in her defeat: her local community members noted open corruption by her office and a complete failure to pass legislation. Be realistic: did Bush’s constituents vote her out because she’s racist to Jews, when statistically most of her constituents have never met one? Or was it because she was bad at her job?

Societies which embrace Jew-hatred follow a similar pattern: at a certain point, it becomes easier for politicians to sell a conspiracy theory about Jewish money and power rather than genuine policy proposals. That’s because societies face challenges of increasing complexity over time, and education doesn’t grow fast enough to prepare most people to cope with these challenges (such as when schools introduced programming about ten years too late, or when they reintroduced trade programs after data said we already don’t have enough tradesmen). People want satisfying answers about what’s happening to them and their ever-changing world, and there is no rational answer which can satisfy quite as much as a simple, emotional one (like “the Mexicans took your job… and the globalist Jews are the ones letting them in”).

Emotional explanations in general have featured prominently in America’s political mainstream since 2016. A recently notable one is the popular claim that Donald Trump was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite every purported instance of voter fraud being either unsupported by evidence or debunked outright. The claim is so popular that people describing themselves as “patriots” stormed the U.S. Capitol to encourage (by force) the overturning of certified electoral results. This attack, and even more so the reasoning behind this attack, demonstrate Americans’ increased willingness to buy into emotional explanations for phenomena they dislike — and politicians’ increased willingness to give it to them.

The rub is that emotional explanations are like diet pills: they make you think you’re solving a problem when you’re actually starving to death. Societies which embrace emotion over reason regarding serious political questions will never actually solve their problems, causing them to fester with time. Populist antisemitism is the ultimate emotional explanation: demonstrating extreme flexibility in adapting to every possible concern, representing big business and little worker; capitalism and socialism; invader and fifth column in a twisted union of opposites. It is fentanyl on a national scale. And just as deadly.

Imagine you’re a politician in a country undergoing hyperinflation, national humiliation, and severe economic pressure from other countries. Solving those problems requires a lot work on your part — and simply by trying to solve them, you assume responsibility for failure: the people will toss you out if you can’t fix it. Alternatively, you can throw your hands up and declare that you can’t solve this problem because the Jews are the source of the trouble, such that your citizens let you off the hook to rage at the Zionist menace and keep you in power as long as you dedicate yourself to fighting the Jewish plague. The funny part is that this scenario isn’t just a Hitler allegory: it’s a Maduro one, too. That sound bite is from last week!

Getting people hooked on antisemitism is great for politicians who want to coast to an easy victory on Jewish blood, no matter how deadly it may be for the addicts in the long run. Politicians can start slow by using dog whistles to administer low doses, such as by embracing bothsideist talking points about Jews and their murderers (something like there being “very fine people” on both sides), or by ostentatiously selecting a generic uninspiring running mate over an invigorating strategic bulwark: an action that would normally be considered self-harm if not for the growing chorus of addicts celebrating it as a massive win. But of course, as time goes on, the people need more and more to get the same high.

With Democrats and Republicans increasingly testing the use of antisemitism to influence elections, more and more disaffected Americans will find themselves enthralled by the prospect of the Jew as their national punching bag. Jewish organizations will need to attack politicians’ usage of antisemitism, demonstrating its inferiority compared to actual policy, if they want to keep this phenomenon contained.